Directories not traffic producing vehicles....?

Look at it the other way around.

If your site is typical, and the directory in question has 20,000,000 listings: then they are creating 20million times 20 referrals a week.

That is a huge amount of traffic and suggests many people are using them.

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You do not mention what percentage of the directory referals go on to convert:

I konw of a website where less than 0.1% of unique visitors go on to purchase. But the owner doesn't think "why do I bother with all this for just 1/1000 of my visitors, it's too pitiful a number to count" He's too busy choosing a new yacht from the income generated from the pitiful few.

Hi Victor

Thanks for the response.

I wasn't complaining about directories, I actually expressing surprise that I was getting any traffic at all from them.

The way I see, it, I sudddenly have the incentive to register with just about every directory in good standing with the Search engines,

I just wanted to know that others where also receiving some traffic from the directories.

I haven't sold a thing from my websites yet, I only woke up to the SEO way of things since March 2006 an I can't give any meaningfull figures, except 1

Traffic Jan 05 to Dec 05 40 unique organic visitors for the whole year, no I dunno where they came from,

Traffic May 06 to July 06 Average 30uniques/day organic visitors mostly from MSN, but that constant , delightful trickle from software directories/libraries. :-)

So, I hope you're saying what I am hoping to hear, Directories an their traffic are worthwhile

Cheers

I think it must vary a LOT with the topic of a website and the kind of directory page it's listed on. An educational website I volunteer for gets quite a lot of traffic from the Google directory, Yahoo directory, ODP and two children's website directories. I assume that's because a lot of people either start at one of those directories, or else search Google for something extremely general like "children's educational websites" and a directory category page comes up as the first result. Once they look at the directories, they must think ours is a topic they'd like to do a report on (or one that the kids in their class would enjoy,) so they click on it.

On the other hand, I can't imagine that a personal homepage on a list of 250 personal homepages beginning with the letter "R" is ever going to get clicked much. I don't think many people cruise the Internet looking for random homepages beginning with the letter R, so not many people are likely to even get to a directory page like that, and if they do, your site still has only a 1/250 chance of getting clicked on.

So it just depends whether your site is on a topic that anyone would find a directory page about in the first place, I think, and then whether the directory page you're listed on is one that's conducive to your URL getting clicked.

I get a few from or two dirs, but that's about it. To make matters worse, it seems that Google has totally discounted their links.

To clarify

my constant stream of visitors come from download libraries to a web application off mine.

This is somewhat different from website directories which i have only recently got listed on.

Just hoping that one gets some traffic from the quality directories as well

One good thing is that once I got listed on the directories, my sites are being spidered much more often by the big 3 SE's

As far as dirctories go... no they are not traffic producing vehicles. What they are is a reference point of contact. Generally if you are in a directory you can expect about .5%-3% conversion to hits. Generally this does not equate to a ton of business if you are only a online company. Directories are most effective for local search, where people can call you or come visit your business. But they are somewhere where people are more apt to purchase than on a search engine, so if you ad is strong enough and your ROI good these are very profitable places to be.

Rowan

Yes, Directories or YPs work well for bricks & Mortar businesses, but its for online traffic that I am currently "researching"

The silence on this question is quite telling.

I am guessing that the vast majority of visitors to directories are webmasters.

Referrals from directories are exceedingly rare in any of my websites. Less than 0.5%. Way less.

Referrals from directories are not even in the top 100 for us. Yahoo directory is #132 for first half of this year, all other directories, including DMOZ and some industry-specific directories, are not even on the list, being under #250 that I track.

We get more referrals from random sites, such as where our URL got posted in some forum (usually one we never heard of before).